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| Joseph Cornell Planet Set, Tête Etoilée, Giuditta Pasta (dédicace) 1950 glass, crystal, paper, wood Tate Gallery |
"Joseph Cornell dedicated this work to the memory of the famous Italian singer Giuditta Pasta (1798-1865), noted especially for her roles in the operas of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. A lifelong bachelor, the artist had a very idealised attitude to women and set high among the objects of his adoration certain of the great prima donnas of the Romantic period such as Pasta and Maria Malibran, and ballerinas such as Fanny Cerrito, whose art, considered sublime by their contemporaries, is now sadly lost to us. Pasta was one of those on whom Cornell assembled a dossier of engravings, articles and other related material, and to whom he dedicated works as an act of homage."
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| Nigel Henderson Stressed Photograph of a Bather ca. 1950 photograph Tate Gallery |
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| Nigel Henderson Stressed Photograph of a Bather ca. 1950 photograph Tate Gallery |
"A pair of black and white photographs with the same title – both works are part of the series of distorted or 'stressed' images that Nigel Henderson produced in the early 1950s. He explained that the process involved 'stretching and distorting the printing paper while enlarging, in order to stress a point or evoke an atmosphere.' Both photographs show a male figure wearing striped swimming trunks standing with his hands on his hips on a beach at the sea's edge. At his feet is a pile of clothes. The two pictures, in fact, derive from one original negative, but one is reversed and each has been distorted to create different visual effects. The original image used for the 'stressed' photographs of bathers did not derive from a picture taken by Henderson, but from a Victorian lantern slide. In 1954 Henderson exhibited examples of his 'stressed' photographs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, where French artist Jean Dubuffet saw them. Dubuffet bought six for his own collection, and wrote to Henderson encouraging him to produce more in this vein. The painter Francis Bacon also owned one of the 'stressed' images of male bathers, possibly received as early as 1950 as a gift from Henderson with whom he was friends."
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| Nigel Henderson Wig Stall, Petticoat Lane 1952 photograph Tate Gallery |
"Wig Stall, Petticoat Lane is one of an extensive series of photographs of street scenes form London's East End that defines Nigel Henderson's output during the late 1940s to early 1950s. In the immediate foreground of the composition is the market stall, its surface covered with packaging and the paraphernalia connected with the products on sale. The middle ground is carefully grouped around five female heads. Four of these are the heads of mannequins mounted on short poles, dressed in fashionable wigs. Between them appears the fifth: a middle-aged woman who pauses to look at the wigs, her face caught in an impassive attitude. The series demonstrates Henderson's fascination with the performative and transitory nature of the urban context. He connected this interest to the sense of separation he experienced from the working-class neighbourhood in which he lived. This sense of separation endowed the street scenes he encountered with a closed, ritualistic, unreal and theatrical quality, the meaning of which was far removed from his own experiences and background."
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| Barbara Hepworth Group I (Concourse) February 4 1951 1951 marble Tate Gallery |
"Hepworth said that this work was inspired by the interaction of people and architecture in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Each form bears 'a specific and absolute position in relation to the others'. Her use of Serravazza marble, a quintessential classical material, is appropriate to such an Italianate source. The artist associated white marble with the Mediterranean sun. In fact, the base and the figures were all carved from a mantelpiece salvaged from her neighbour's house."
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| William Scott Mackerel on a Plate 1951-52 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Scott became interested in painting realist still-lifes in the 1930s, often portraying the kitchen implements that he kept around his studio. He considered his work to be influenced by the French still-life tradition, particularly the eighteenth-century artist Chardin. As he developed, the objects became flatter, and later in the 1950s became abstract shapes."
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| Victor Willing Standing Nude ca. 1952-53 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
"Willing attended the Slade School of Art from 1949 to 1954, studying both sculpture and painting. For both disciplines, much time was spent drawing and painting in the Slade School life room, where this work was executed. At this time Willing was interested in the work of Giacometti and Bacon. From Giacometti Willing learnt how to capture resemblance to the model by a painstaking concentration on perception, while from Bacon he learnt to seize the presence of the subject."
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| Wolfgang Suschitzky Whitehall from Trafalgar Square 1953 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| Keith Vaughan Drawing of figures moving boulders 1953 drawing Tate Gallery |
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| Keith Vaughan Mario 1956 drawing Tate Gallery |
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| Jacques Lipchitz Study for monument to The Spirit of Enterprise 1953 bronze statuette Tate Gallery |
"In 1950 Lipchitz was commissioned to contribute a work to an open-air collection of sculpture commemorating American history at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. This is a study for the five-metre-wide Spirit of Enterprise that resulted. It shows a striding pioneer, bearing a caduceus (the ancient symbol of commerce), being led by an eagle."
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| Marc Riboud The British Museum 1954 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| Peter Coker Sheep's Head 1955 charcoal, watercolor and pastel Tate Gallery |
"In 1955 Coker began a series of paintings inspired by a butcher's shop near his home in the East End of London. The drawing above was used as preparation for one of these paintings, Table and Chair, in which the lively and enquiring face of a child contrasts with the impassive face of the dead animal."
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| René Burri Suez Canal, Egypt, 1956 1956 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
"This image is part of a portfolio of twenty-seven prints, selected and compiled by Swiss photographer René Burri as a cohesive group shortly before his death in 2014. The selection spans his sixty-year career and includes a number of his best-known black and white works as well as a group of lesser known colour works. The portfolio was printed by Burri in 2014 and issued in an edition of five, plus one artist's proof."
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London